Planar appliqués are used for displaying information and for providing added aesthetic appeal to facias or instrument panels of automotive vehicles. For example, such appliqués are used as speedometers, rev. counters or the like.
A feature that has been added to instrument panels, e.g. for reasons of aesthetic appeal, are chrome or mirror like rings, which form a rim that surrounds an instrumentation gauge. Typically such rims are provided for the speedometer and engine speed or rev. counter gauges.
A known method of creating such instrument panels having rims is to mount a separately formed rim or rims on a substantially planar appliqué. Individually moulded rims are mounted to the appliqué by means of ultrasonic welding or heat welding. The appliqué is typically a flat polycarbonate sheet which may have printing thereon. Each of the individually moulded rims is typically formed from an ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic, which is in turn exposed to a vacuum metalisation process in order to give each rim a chrome or mirror like effect.
The process of vacuum metalisation has the disadvantages of having a high fall out rate, as well being environmentally unfriendly. In addition, the process of mounting the rims to the appliqué has the disadvantage of requiring additional manufacturing steps and time—which ultimately leads to higher production costs. Particularly, careful alignment of the appliqué and rims is required.
Prior art known from searches carried out on the two GB applications from which the present case claims priority comprises:
GB 2 220 282 A(WINWARD),GB 2 201 387 A(YAZAKI),GB 1 424 337(UNION CARBIDE),GB 1 026 887(LUCAS),GB 0 527 718(LUCAS),GB 0 498 095(AUTO UNION),EP 0 676 307 A(MAGNETTI MARELLI),GB 2 281 529 A(KAUMAGRAPH), andUS 6 267 072 B1(SETO)
The content of these prior art documents are incorporated herein by reference.
It is an object of at least one embodiment of at least one aspect of the present invention to obviate or at least mitigate one or more of the aforementioned problems in the prior art.
It is also an object of at least one embodiment of at least one aspect of the present invention to provide an appliqué comprising a flat tile having at least one and preferably two integral upstanding bezel rings, the tile being made of a plastics material.
It is also an object of at least one embodiment of at least one aspect of the present invention to provide an appliqué comprising a flat tile having at least one, and preferably two, bezel ring(s) being convex when viewed from an obverse surface of the appliqué and concave when viewed from a reverse surface of the appliqué.